Titus Groan

This novel is a masterpiece, and I will – someday, someday – read the rest of the series, including the novella Boy in Darkness.

In the introduction to my edition, Anthony Burgess wrote that Peake’s books “nourish the private imagination”, and that “he does not seek – in his subject-matter – to probe topical themes like race, class and homosexuality or advance the frontiers of what we call the contemporary consciousness”.

While I might agree with the first statement, I’m puzzled by the second. If anything Titus Groan – and, from what I can gather, of the remaining books as well – is about change. It is about breaking the status quo and destroying tradition, and as the setting has something of an upstairs-downstairs feel, this book cannot be read without class in mind. Burgess seems to be stuck in a kind of surface-level, explicit politics, whereas great literature might inspire people in a more indirect way, nourishing the imagination – the power to imagine something different is one of the engines of social change.

It’s quite strange that Burgess missed this, as Peake is quite explicit, here and there – like in this passage, already on page 26:

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Full review on Weighing A Pig...